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Influence of nitrogen flow ratio on properties of c-axis oriented AlN films grown by RF magnetron sputtering

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Abstract

Successful growth of c-axis oriented aluminum nitride (AlN) films with uniform columnar structure on (0006) sapphire substrates by Radio Frequency (RF) reactive magnetron sputtering. In this paper, the crystal structure and morphological characteristics of AlN films were changed by varying the nitrogen (N2) flow ratio in the mixture of N2 and argon (Ar) gas, i.e., N2/(Ar + N2). Transmission electron microscopy and X-ray diffractometer analysis confirmed that the AlN films first formed a buffer layer at the interface and subsequently exhibited a high degree of c-axis orientation. Combined atomic force microscopy and scanning electron microscope tests show that the surface undulations of the AlN films were very small reaching a root mean square (RMS) surface roughness of 0.2750 nm. The X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy spectra confirmed the formation of AlN. Finally, the optical band gap and defect types of the films were determined by ultraviolet and visible spectrophotometry and photoluminescence spectrum.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the S and T Program of Hebei (Grant No. 20311001D), the Research Foundation of Education Bureau of Hebei (Grant No. QN2021044), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51871089, 61674051), the project for Science and Technology Correspondent of Tianjin City (Grant No. 20YDTPJC01710).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, 300130, China

    Guifeng Chen, Haoran Li, Xinjian Xie, Luxiao Xie, Endong Wang, Guodong Liu, Hui Zhang, Bowen Lu, Changxing Li & Haobo Pei

  2. Hebei Engineering Laboratory of Photoelectronic Functional Crystals, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, 300130, China

    Guifeng Chen, Endong Wang & Guodong Liu

  3. School of Science, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, 300130, China

    Xinjian Xie

  4. Key Laboratory of Nanodevices and Applications, Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and NanoBionics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou, 215000, China

    Hui Zhang

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  1. Guifeng Chen
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Chen, G., Li, H., Xie, X. et al. Influence of nitrogen flow ratio on properties of c-axis oriented AlN films grown by RF magnetron sputtering. Appl. Phys. A 127, 819 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-021-04972-1

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